In 25 years' time, when they're making documentaries on the great recession of 2010, picture researchers will surely seize with delight on images of a show in which young Britons touched and hugged large packets of cash before watching in dismay as the loot they desired dropped down chutes.

The Million Pound Drop Live, Channel 4's new nightly gameshow, raises in an extreme form the question of the extent to which television should adapt to the mood of a recession. Is it appropriate for a channel to be flashing the cash when all the political rhetoric is about spending less? The counter-argument is that, in a time of austerity, there may be more call for giveaway gameshows. With contestants proportionately more likely to be jobless or skint, telly can operate as a de facto welfare state, subsidising the poor.

This show, though, doesn't qualify for that defence because, even more so than Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, the prize is very hard to win. Indeed, all the symbolism is of financial pain, as contestants stack great slabs of banknotes on trap-doors that open when they get an answer wrong, so players are literally throwing money away. If you were unemployed and taking part in this show, it would seem not the answer to your dreams but a cruel echo of your nightmares.

What it most resembles is a moralistic engraving about the dangers of greed. Hopeful couples try to grapple and embrace the surge of sterling – like movie bank-blaggers in the scene where the clumsy one drops the holdall on a windy street – but it squirms away from them. They cannot handle it.

Although the programme is not directly interactive – which hostess Davina McCall attributes to security, but probably has more to do with scars from recent hoax-show scandals – viewers can answer simultaneously on computers. McCall revealed that, on Tuesday, 1,410 people did better than the contestants. This means the really smart people are not in the studio, a clever move by the producers but, like so much of the show, rather cruel.